This is a short essay about the perks and quirks of living away and travelling as part of the job description, which is part of the deal when you join a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) as AMVA4NewPhysics and might apply for the most part to other research positions. The points made here are based on my own personal experiences and discussions with people in analogous situations. I am eager to hear your thoughts regarding this matter in the comment section!
One of the main principles of the scientific method is reproducibility, which could be defined as the possibility to duplicate an entire experiment or study independently in the future.
For those doing scientific data analyses, like the members of this network, the same principle applies, so that all the data, methods, and tools should be provided and documented with enough detail to allow other researchers to obtain exactly the same results for the same datasets or to redo the analysis with new data. Do you think this is an unrealistic expectation or the way to go?
It is about time for my second post of this technical series. This piece will include some tips and tricks that are useful when using Secure Shell (SSH) to access remote computers. It is a must-read if you have to write your username@hostname and password to access every time, you do not know what tunnelling is or you are annoyed by the inconvenience of having to access remote files.
You might have given a terminal multiplexer a chance (checkout my previous post on this series on that topic if not) but you are still not comfortable Continue reading “Hacker metamorphysics: SSH”
What if you have some data you want to model, but do not know anything about its parent distribution, so you have to make as little assumptions as possible? In this post, I will go through the concept of density estimation and I will play with some interesting non-parametric methods.
This is the first post in a series which will go over some of the computing tools and practises that make my life as a scientific researcher easier. Today I will tell you about tmux and some of its use cases. Tmux is a modern terminal multiplexer and has become an extremely useful component of my remote data analysis and software development workflow.
Both in industry and in many scientific disciplines Continue reading “Hacker metarmorphysics: tmux”
Hej! I am ashamed to say that this is the only Swedish I was able to learn at the 2nd Machine Learning in High Energy Physics Summer School you already heard about from Giles. ML-wise the school was quite instructive, though, especially due to competitions organized during the school. I also have a challenge for you!
Hey, it’s been a while since I wrote my last post! We’ve been quite preoccupied with hh → bbbb data analysis tasks and internal CMS presentations. I have several topics I want to talk about here so I will try to post more regularly in the following weeks. For today, I want to start a discussion about one important aspect of our job as scientists, which is software development. Continue reading “Physicists ≠ Software Developers”
Almost two months ago, Tommaso and I designed a challenge about guessing the b-flavour content of jets in simulated QCD processes. The aim of the competition was to predict the fraction of events with 0,1,2,3 and 4 selected b-jets (i.e. jets which contain b-hadrons) after an event selection which resembles the one used for the HH → bbbb analysis we are working on. Continue reading “I lost a bet!”
At the end of last week, the 1st AMVA4NewPhysics Workshop took place in Venice. It was quite useful for coordinating future network activities and meeting the other ESR fellows and members. The workshop program also included several short scientific talks related to the different work packages. I had a small slot (15 minutes) for a talk myself, which was titled “Higgs pair production searches: a data scientist’s perspective“. Continue reading “A data scientist’s perspective?”
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